Lipscomb wins honorable mention for Mayor's Award for Outstanding School Partner

Janel Shoun-Smith | 

A committee appointed by Nashville mayor Karl Dean recently selected Lipscomb University, with specific accolades to the College of Education, as the honorable mention honoree for the 2012 Mayor’s Award for Outstanding School Partner. 

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Students from Napier Elementary and Cameron Middle visited campus during the spring 2012 semester.

“The judges were nearly unanimous in their choice and they were very complimentary of the work Lipscomb is doing across the campus,” said Connie Williams, coordinator of the awards for the mayor’s office and executive director of the PENCIL Foundation, the premier organization linking community resources with Metro Nashville Public Schools.

Lipscomb has served as a PENCIL partner to either Glendale Middle School or Croft Middle School for 27 years. In the 2011-12 school year, Lipscomb officials held three Bison Bunch events, bringing 60 public school students to campus and introducing them to campus through events like the College Scavenger Hunt or by grouping them with current college students to serve as mentors. 

Additional activities that earned the university its honorable mention award were:

  • Partnering with Maplewood High School as its students prepared for the ACT.
  • Hosting more than 100 second-graders from Napier Elementary and eighth-graders from Cameron Middle School to give them a real-life vision of the goal of a college education. 
  • Sponsoring the Whites Creek Teaching Academy.
  • Regularly providing space for a variety of Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools events.
  • Ten Lipscomb professors working with Cameron Middle School sixth-graders to work on reading and language arts skills for a five-week TCAP intervention leading up to the test.
  • Providing teaching strategies and academic workshops for after-school programs through Nashville After-School Zone Alliance (NAZA).
  • Regularly using the purple Lipscomb bus to take students on field trips, to after-school events or to campus. 
  • Sponsoring “March Math-ness,” a math enrichment program that uses a bracket system to encourage students to complete math assessments. Lipscomb provided a pizza party for the winning class at each grade level and a “March Math-ness” lapel pin.

Lipscomb’s PENCIL partnership with Croft Middle School has also benefitted the Lipscomb College of Education, offering education majors the opportunity to practice their teaching skills in actual classrooms. Twenty-nine education majors each spent 20 hours in a classroom this academic year as part of a required practicum.

“Lipscomb’s partnership with the PENCIL Foundation and the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools continues to provide huge benefits for both the schools and the university,” said Lipscomb’s College of Education Dean Candice McQueen. “As Lipscomb’s faculty and students work closely, often one-on-one, with Metro Nashville teachers, students and administrators, we get a front-line view of how today’s educational system works. That not only serves to prepare our future graduates, but it helps the university as a whole develop the most innovative and effective programs for students and teachers to make greater achievements in the classroom.” 

McQueen also serves on the board of directors for the PENCIL Foundation and has been the opening speaker at the last two annual PENCIL Foundation BRAVO luncheon events.